Divorce in Denmark

This book traces the emotional history of marriage breakdown and divorce in Denmark from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first. Drawing on a diverse archive—separation and divorce case records, custody disputes, advice columns, political debates, scientific texts, popular culture, and fiction—it examines how men, women, and children experienced marital dissolution, and how those experiences reflected and reshaped the societies in which they unfolded.The volume advances an analytical framework built around three concepts: emotional formation, emotional echoes, and emotional frontiers. Emotional formation denotes the historically shifting structures—legal, institutional, religious, economic, and cultural—that shape what feelings are possible, legible, and appropriate in a given context. Emotional echoes captures the active, embodied process through which individuals draw on available cultural repertoires to interpret and communicate their experiences, thereby reproducing and subtly transforming those formations. Emotional frontiers marks the frictions that arise when incongruent emotional codes collide—across class, gender, age, or institutional setting.The chapters move across public discourse, bureaucratic procedures, infidelity, gendered violence, custody disputes, and the scientific pursuit the emotions children of divorce. It shows how competing narratives of divorce—as a shameful failure or a path to liberation—proved remarkably tenacious, while documenting how the emotional texture of marital dissolution shifted as welfare institutions expanded, gender relations changed, and children came to be recognized as emotional subjects. Denmark's liberal, egalitarian context offers a productive vantage point from which to examine how power operates through emotion in its subtler registers.